Overdue attention for youth mental health

On Thursday, Miss TT World, Aché Abrahams, met with the Prime Minister, and she made a point that she wanted to participate in any effort to raise the profile of mental health, particularly in secondary schools.

In the Senate on Tuesday, Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh announced plans to expand child guidance clinics in the South and North Western Regional Health Authorities and to develop a 24/7 mental health chat line.

These initiatives, as potentially commendable as they are, remain overtures in dealing with a matter that has been raised regularly for more than a decade.

In November 2017, Parliament’s Joint Select Committee (JSC) on Social Services and Public Administration was warned that there are no dedicated inpatient psychiatric facilities for children under 18 and that pediatric hospitals were overwhelmed with cases requiring professional intervention.

A month later, in an interview with Newsday, incoming chairman of the Children’s Authority Hanif Benjamin expressed his concern that well into a new century, TT was still to take a progressive approach to understanding and managing mental health issues.

“We see people on the street and we call them madmen and madwomen,” he said, “but we don’t know that there was a beginning, and that beginning is a person who is dealing with a mental illness and not receiving treatment.”

By May 2022, the situation had not appreciably improved. Responding to JSC questions about five teenage boys who escaped the care of the Children’s Authority, an incident that ended with two of the children shot dead, the authority’s deputy director of care service, Rhonda Gregoire-Roopchan, mentioned in passing that a fifth of the 55 children in its care were either diagnosed or being monitored as presenting symptoms of mental health challenges.

These children were being treated at standard health centers, and Ms. Gregoire-Roopchan called for a dedicated, long-term care facility.

When the social services JSC turned its attention to support for schoolchildren facing mental health issues in March 2022, the news wasn’t much better.

The Education Ministry’s Student Support Services Division, the agency tasked with addressing mental health challenges among students, had 328 vacancies, 127 of which were for social workers and 24 for psychologists. These shortfalls persisted even as the ministry recorded nine deaths by suicide among secondary school students between 2019 and 2022.

The clinics promised by the Health Ministry that will deliver public health interventions for mental health care are urgently needed.

Meanwhile, solutions that can be brought into existence quickly should be given priority, including wider communication of existing free mental health services, and plans for a 24/7 chat line should be advanced with vigor.